I recently began reading the book Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul by Stuart Brown and felt instant nostalgia for the times in my life when I actually allowed myself to play. This of course is a scary prospect, as it seems too often in my life I have altogether forgotten the joys of play by cramming my schedule so full with tasks and appointments that there is little time left to engage in play. I have always attributed this rearranging of priorities to the fact that I love my job and truly enjoy the oft-perceived drudgery of reading articles, researching, and toying with complicated concepts. My true creative outlet comes forth in lesson planning and designing learning experiences for my students to explore, challenge, and build knowledge through active learning–even in a college setting– as opposed to give and get transmission models of learning.

But still–maybe that’s not enough. Maybe vested engagement in play for the pure joy of itself regardless of professional implications is just as necessary. Brown even suggests that taking breaks from work to engage in play may improve our ability to do our work, refreshed and reinvigorated and possibly in possession of insights we were too focused to make.
“Authentic play comes from deep down inside us. It’s not formed or motivated solely by others. Real play interacts with and involves the outside world, but it fundamentally expresses the needs and desires of the player. It emerges from the imaginative force within. That’s part of the adaptive power of play: with a pinch of pleasure, it integrates our deep physiological, emotional, and cognitive capacities. And quite without knowing it, we grow. We harmonize the influences within us” (p. 104).
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Interesting perspective that was only reinforced earlier this week when I came across this article on recess and play in a New Zealand School, where more freedom and access to play actually improved safety. So why not improve overall education too?

“What we are witnessing today is something new, and something much more dangerous than a worship of science or the ‘cult of efficiency.” Its uniqueness lies in its pervasiveness, its threat to the very foundations of public education, its wide embrace by the educational establishment, its direct assault on the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical life of teachers, and its radical misunderstanding of teaching” (Taubman, 2009, p. 5).

I cannot get this image out of my head since reading the introduction to the book Teaching by Numbers by Peter Taubman. It’s a familiar image, probably wedged somewhere in your memory between nostalgia and fad. It also probably represents the last time I attempted to “paint” or be artistic in any traditional sense. The title references the infamous Paint by Number sets that allowed any John, Jane, or Sarah to become an instant artist by following prescribed directives as to what color to paint each sectioned and numbered area on the page, that eventually evolved into a coherent image when–voila–the painting was complete! To even suggest that the art of art could be broken down and essentialized into coloring corresponding segments is simplistic at best. To take the essence and soul out of an aesthetic understanding may have reduced the creation of art to a list of steps, but then again, it was basically an activity for children to complete–not a devaluing of  the profession and nature of “art” itself.

In a similar fashion, the art of teaching is being reduced by and large into a disturbingly familiar pattern of “teaching by numbers,” as his metaphor goes. In many ways, the privatization and corporate take-over of public education is applying the same methodology to dull the creativity and genuine passion that has led so many professionals into the field of education. Pre-packaged curriculum with pacing guides, prepared materials, and the imposition of externalized values of worth and corresponding measures, have attempted to essentialize and reduce the nature of teaching to its most simplistic form. And yet, what I fear most, is not just the existence of this trend but what feels like an ever-increasing tide of public agreement with this sentiment. In contrast to the former example, where painting by numbers did not intend to replace the imaginings of what constitutes “art,” I fear in many ways that the opposite reality exists in the realm of education.

By reducing the myriad of decisions related to content, instructional strategies, classroom management, communication, organization, and most importantly relationship building down to a list of bullets or steps to follow with little input or reference to the actual “goings-on” in the classroom, how can these pre-packaged systems really deliver any legitimate education? How can we reduce the complexity of context and culture to boxes and numbers and honestly tell ourselves (and our communies) that our intent lies in improving the quality of educational experiences?
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One more lie, I just don’t buy. And yet, I realize that I too am part of the problem–very much so in many regards–but those shortcomings are for another time, another blog.

One of the first topics we are exploring in my literacy course is the role of dialect in shaping attitudes and identities. It is interesting how many of the assumptions raised in this video  (US Language Attitudes) are presented by the contributors as not only pervasive but innocuous. The associated prejudices appear more as foregone conclusions as opposed to established stereotypes that can negatively impact one’s perception of others as well as of oneself.
In order to personally “hook” students on the idea of dialect (as defined within the boundaries of vocabulary and syntactic differences), a recent post from the New York Times, “How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk,” presents a scary-accurate test to assess your regional background based on your answers to a short series of multiple choice questions. So far, I’ve consulted with 5 other people who have taken this test, hailing from areas across the country–all of whom were easily and accurately pegged to their hometowns. Seems like a great introduction into what will hopefully be a reflective and engaging conversation.